Saturday, December 17, 2005

Invasion

I woke up this morning with a half-asleep dread that I was in trouble. I guess it had followed me from my dream, when the Evil Tripods from Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds had finally showed up in my sleepy little Korean town to get me.
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As I started to come to, I was filled with horror, realizing I wasn't dreaming. I could hear them right outside. I was about to be captured and have my insides sucked out. What a drag!
Suddenly I was filled with rage and a burst of survival instinct. It was Friday morning. There's no way I was going to be taken out before a blessed weekend without a fight. I clamored out of bed and whipped open my balcony door to step outside clad only in my bright red nightshirt. "BRING IT, ASSHOLE TRIPODS," I postured.

I was a little relieved, but far more annoyed to realize it was the start of some construction project underneath my window. It was 7:46 a.m. It wasn't tripods waiting to eat me, it was the 2nd worst thing, men with heavy machinery and other men with clipboards.
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The big yellow thing smashed holes in the pavement. The man pushed a thing specifically designed to make smoke and wake me up. I think it's technical name is "Smoky-Jenn-Waker-Upper."
I came back inside long enough to visit the loo, grab the camera, and head back outside for a snapshot. Nemesis documentation. Then I sat on the edge of my bed and shredded cotton make-up-remover pads to shove in my ears. I need to sleep in the mornings. I'd only GONE to bed about 3 and a half hours before, after all.

Lying back down, I considered ways I could make the men and machines below me stop what they were doing. I had conversation with myself:
Me1: "You could shoot them!"
Me2: "No, you don't have a gun, and besides, after the fact they'd do some fancy trajectory calculations and realize the fatal shots came from your balcony. That's damning evidence."
Me1: "I could scale down the side to the building to another balcony and shoot them,..."
Me2: "You don't have a gun."
Me1: "Oh yah. Well, I could file an injunction in court" (trying to be rational.)
Me2: "You don't speak Korean, and I'm pretty sure they're not breaking any laws."

With my irrational attempt at rational being trumped by real-tional, I resorted to whining.

Me1 and 2: "I'm tiiiiiiired. It's loooooouuuuud!"

Me1: "You could boil some water and heave it at them"
Me2: "You don't have a pot big enough to make it worthwhile, and they're not directly under you, but across the parkinlo..."
Me1: "Oil would be better."
Me2: "Again, you don't have a big enough po,....."

Then I fell asleep.
And I woke up (thankfully) before the alarm, which I probably wouldn't have heard, what with my ears being full o'cotton.
Meanwhile, they'd progressed downstairs to this:
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They were installing huge concrete cylinders below ground for some reason. Probably nuclear waste storage.

I've learned that when the tripods DO attack my defense is going to be fairly weak: a plugging of the ears and a making of the list of things I can't do.

Meanwhile, returning home tonight, equipment lurks still in the dug up parkinglot, which makes me think attack #2 is coming up at first dawn tomorrow. Saturday.
Me1 and 2: "@*#$&^@*!!!!"

1 comment:

Sean McMinn said...

Hey! Thanks for taking up the challange at Blogexplosion. A Canadian teaching in Korea, eh. Nice. I've been teaching in China for the last 3 1/2 years. It's a great time. I'm originally from Cambridge, Ontario (probably why I left). Good luck!